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KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE FIRMS 41

judgements that highlight means–ends relationships are difficult or impos-
sible to make.
Furthermore, it has already been emphasized that knowledge workers will,
to a greater or lesser extent, resent any attempt to directly monitor and control
their work, demanding and requiring as they do high levels of autonomy in
order to carry out their major work tasks. The leaders of knowledge-intensive
firms are therefore always seeking ways to manage the fundamental underlying
tension that exists between efficiency and autonomy. Whilst structural condi-
tions which emphasize flexibility and self-managed team-working are important
preconditions facilitating knowledge work tasks, the cultural conditions within
the firm will be at least as important in ultimately creating an enabling con-
text for knowledge work processes that are largely conducted autonomously.
It is the cultural conditions within a knowledge-intensive firm that primarily
promote ‘responsible autonomy’ (Friedman, 1977), where employees use their
work autonomy to advance the interests of the organization and not just their
own personal interests.

Cultural (normative) control
Whilst leaders of knowledge-intensive firms will be keen to employ individuals
with particular skills and expertise, their general requirements will be rather
broad, recognizing that diversity across the workforce is considered to be a sig-
nificant factor promoting innovation (see, e.g. Grant, 1996; Lowendahl, 1997;
Nonaka, 1994). In Chapter 1, it was highlighted that the nature of knowledge
production is changing and increasingly knowledge production relies on the
combination of knowledge from a variety of fields and disciplines. Not only
does this create a challenging environment in which to work from the perspec-
tive of the individual knowledge worker (see Chapter 4 for a detailed exami-
nation of the challenges faced by multi-disciplinary, inter-dependent teams),
diversity also generates significant management challenges in a very loosely
organized environment. A form of management grounded in cultural or nor-
mative control has been suggested to be an appropriate approach to adopt
within these organizational environments. The suggestion is that leaders of
these types of firm are in a position to create and develop a corporate culture
which workers will want and choose to identify with. By identifying with the
organization it is assumed that workers internalize the dominant organiza-
tional ideology – values, beliefs and norms – and consequently behave in the
interests of the firm.
The arguments around the role of corporate culture have been develop-
ing at least since the 1980s and the ‘business excellence’ ideas of that period
(Peters and Waterman, 1982). Deal and Kennedy (1982), Kanter (1984),
Schein (1983, 1992), also promoted the idea that it is the primary task of
leaders of organizations to develop and actively reinforce strong organiza-
tional cultures. ‘Improvements in productivity and quality, it is argued, flow
from corporate cultures that systematically recognize and reward individuals,

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